Oliver Kamm gets several things wrong here:

In 1999, two years after his first landslide election victory and at the height of the Kosovo crisis, Blair gave a notable speech on foreign policy in Chicago. He cited both Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as threats to international stability. The emphasis of that speech refutes the absurd and insulting charge that after 9/11 Blair acted as “Bush’s poodle.” In reality, Blair was arguing a case for the responsibility to protect threatened populations while Bush, then governor of Texas and an aspiring presidential nominee, was opposing the Bill Clinton administration’s supposed entanglements in the Balkans.

In fact, Blair’s conduct in 1999 showed how eager he was to be the yes-man or lackey (is that less insulting?) to whichever President happened to be in office. Yes, Blair was and is a liberal interventionist, and I suppose we can say that he actually believed some of the foolish things he said over the years on this subject. That doesn’t refute any of the criticisms of Blair’s willingness to support Bush administration policies even though it came at the expense of British interests and sometimes violated international law. It just confirms that Blair’s warped understanding of the U.S.-U.K. relationship was shaped to a large extent by an ideology that dictated that Britain commit itself to numerous military engagements around the world, most of which were undertaken on U.S. initiative. If it helps, I’m sure Blair would have been happy to be Gore’s yes-man as well.

I don’t know how anyone can think of then-Gov. Bush as an opponent of Clinton’s interventions in the Balkans. Bush didn’t oppose the Kosovo intervention. During the second presidential debate, Bush was falling over himself to emphasize how much he supported Clinton’s illegal war:

I think it’s a triumph. I thought the President made the right decision in joining NATO in bombing Serbia. I supported them when they did so. I called upon the Congress not to hamstring the administration, and in terms of forcing troop withdrawals on a timetable, it wasn’t in necessarily our best interests or fit our nation’s strategy.

There were many elected Republicans in the House opposed to the Kosovo war, but Bush was never in agreement with them. Bush also stated his support for Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia. The only interventions in the 1990s that Bush claimed to oppose were Somalia and Haiti. “Humble foreign policy” rhetoric notwithstanding, Bush’s fairly consistent support for almost every previous U.S. intervention from the 1980s on should have been a warning that no one should have expected anything different from him once he was in office.